
It is 5 a.m., and the morning moon pierces through the windows. I wake up with a feeling of scattered anger and a suffocating sense of imprisonment, ready to revolutionize something, but confused and uncertain about what that something may be.
The moon reminds me of Kali, the fierce Hindu goddess with a necklace of chopped-off heads, dancing on the body of a supine Shiva. I associate her with radical honesty, an invitation to do a spiritual striptease. I shed all pretense—of being spiritual, of being a teacher, of having to remain calm, equanimous, and unconditionally receptive. This naked, humble vulnerability of just being human feels fresh and vital. It’s liberating not to pretend to be something I’m not. That’s why I chose to become a monk.
Being a monk is not an identity. It is a petition to be without identity, to be nothing and nobody (or everything and everybody, if you prefer). It is a suspension of society’s demand to take on a role and conform to its requirements. It’s an invitation to always be new—not the requirement of constant newness like the identity of an artist—that’s another trap—but rather a continuous new beginning, like a durational reset.
As I write this, a sigh of liberation shivers through my body. As someone perceived as a spiritual teacher, the trap of assuming a role is always lurking. The shared story of liberation, with a visionary teacher leading the way, is the ultimate boon if we seek to escape our collective suffering. It’s also an abdication of personal responsibility. It perpetuates the fantasy of teaching/learning and healing/being healed, at the expense of our inner availability and ownership.
As Eric Baret ("Let the moon be free") aptly states: “A guru is someone with a financial problem.” Pretending to be a healer or teacher, and believing that others need teaching or healing, is the great theatre of confusion. In the pleasurable, archetypal care dynamic, we demand and obey the enactment of this fantasy. It is a willing surrender into something we are not: identifying with a role because we want to be someone. By keeping ourselves busy with learning and healing, we avoid listening and realizing we don’t know. Neither do we need to know. The quest for understanding, purification, healing, or fulfillment erodes the vitality and freshness of being completely available to what is. It’s not the solution, it’s the problem.
Without regular spiritual striptease, I risk getting caught in these fantasies, pretending to be someone I am not. It’s so enticing to become part of a shared story, where I have a meaningful role to play. This subtle buildup of identity can go unnoticed, almost like a romance, until our newly embraced role demands obedience and protection. Our collective story becomes a shared imprisonment of pretense, assimilating to what we are not, in order to avoid the fear of being nothing at all.
When we relate to ourselves as objects—by identifying with roles, pretending to be divine or realized, or trying to “forget the bad and pretend to be good”—and classify everything we don’t understand about our spiritual quest as “beyond concepts” or “ineffable,” we have become spiritual materialists (Chögyam Trungpa).
Instead, we can choose to live what we are. “It means seeing our confusion, or misery and pain, but not making those discoveries into an answer… Instead we explore further and further without looking for an answer… Going further in, without the reference point of spirituality, of a savior, or of good and bad—without any reference point whatsoever! … Until we reach the basic level of (conceptual, red.) hopelessness. This one-shot, longingly ruthless process of psychological penetration is the essence of crazy wisdom and a path to liberation” (from Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa).
That’s our invitation to you at House of the beloved: a spiritual striptease that cuts through stories, pretense, and roles, enabling us to be naked (different) together. It requires the humility of collectively not understanding, while staying present and connected. It’s not about abdicating responsibility to a guru, but choosing the uncomfortable availability to the unobjectifiable immediacy of the moment, surrendering into accepting and enacting what is there, daring to be absolutely nothing.
Following beauty.
Welcome.
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